With the advent of each new medium came an inherent scare for the producers of the ‘old media’: Would this new medium kick them out of business? So far, all ‘old media’ were able to survive in the long run, if only after making some adaptions and after accepting a certain decline in their audience. Rather than being replaced by newer forms of communications, existing media were faced with increasing competition in the market place for information and entertainment.

Today Facebook announced it’s new layout/complete overhaul. Great summaries of the most important changes can be found at Yahoo! and at AllFacebook.com, but the question that remains is: Does the new design offer any transmedia opportunities? After all, it was also announced today that Facebook has now got over 800 million users – an immense audience, and even better possibilities of targeting particular niches due to Facebook’s unparalleled user profiling.

Tonight it was time for another ad-hoc Transmedia LA Meetup. This time the guest was Prof. Henry Jenkins, one of the earliest thought-leaders on transmedia and convergence culture. I am basing the following paragraphs solely on the notes I took during Henry’s talk, so they are no word-for-word transcription. As a matter of fact, I will be paraphrasing most of the time. If you see phrases or sentences in quotation marks, they denote a word-for-word citation, but everything else is just summing up Henry’s words.

In today’s edition of the Fast Company newsletter, Adrian Slywotzky writes on one of the concepts of his upcoming book: Hassle maps. Hassle maps “catalog every frustration, time-wasting complication, and source of uncertainty” for consumers in their daily lives, and more particularly, when they consume certain products. A standard procedure in many extremely successful companies such as Apple, Netflix, and Google, it is clear that hassle maps can give a business a crucial edge over their competitors. While it could be argued that ‘hassle map’ is only a fancy term for “listen, really listen to your consumers and put yourself in

In this post I would like to draw your attention to three current entertainment trends that you must bear in mind when developing transmedia projects: 1. The growing movie market in the BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India, China) countries; 2. the exponential growth of new media in large parts of the world; and 3. the resulting changing media consumption pattern amongst audiences.

When it comes to stylistic platform potency, there are certain aspects that determine the best use of each platform in transmedia storytelling. Unlike its economic counterpart, however, stylistic platform potency concerns itself mostly with how a narrative can be told most effectively, and more specifically, how it can be most meaningful to its audience. “How does this particular medium communicate?”

You may already have come across the term ‘platform potency’ in the ‘Transmedia Defined‘ section of this website. Platform potency is a pretty big concept so I’d like to explain the term in a little more detail. Platform potency is a media platform’s ability to convey a certain narrative (or part thereof) to audiences in the most effective way possible. Platform potency is determined by each platform’s defining characteristics, mostly format (e.g. length, voice, narrative structure) and audience reach (e.g. mass vs. niche).

Last night I attended the Transmedia Meetup here in LA. The guest speaker was George Ruiz, Head of New Media and Senior Vice-President Business Affairs at ICM. George did a great job at summarizing the current challenges and opportunities of transmedia, and I’d like to repeat them here in case you weren’t able to make last night’s meetup.